SAMUEL BUTLER (1835–1902) Poet, painter, musician, critic, amateur scientist, and philosopher, Samuel Butler was a polymathic but faintly ridiculous figure in late 19thcentury culture, as likely to pursue eccentric hobbyhorses (his belief that Homer was a woman, for example) as he was to produce significant works of literature. However, Erewhon, his satirical novel about a society where Victorian values were turned on their heads, remains brilliantly readable and The Way of All Flesh, published posthumously, is a powerful fictional critique of the orthodoxies of the age.

 The novel charts several generations of a family but it focuses on Ernest Pontifex whose anxious and unhappy character is shaped by the narrow religious beliefs of his father and grandfather before him. Ordained as a minister more because his family wishes it than because he has any genuine vocation for the church, Ernest faces social catastrophe when he naïvely mistakes a respectable woman for a prostitute and propositions her. He is imprisoned but, ironically, this proves a liberating experience, allowing him to begin the process of shaking off the shackles of religious and social conformity which bind him. More trials and tribulations are to follow – he enters unwittingly into a bigamous marriage with a former chambermaid, for example – but he is on the road to self-fulfilment. 

The Way of All Flesh was written more than twenty years before Butler’s death but he chose not to publish it in his lifetime. When it did appear it was immediately hailed as a devastating assault on the hypocrisies and self-righteousness of the Victorian age. Reaching for hyperbole, George Bernard Shaw called it ‘one of the summits of human achievement’. For modern readers it can have little of the revelatory power it had for its first audience but it remains a witty and compassionate exploration of religious and social repression and of one man’s struggle to attain his true self. 

  Read on Erewhon Ivy Compton-Burnett, A House and Its Head; Edmund Gosse, Father and Son (autobiography rather than fiction but a similar portrait of incompatability of beliefs across the Victorian generations)